Note: Deep-diving in the liberal end of the pool can result in brain injury. Proceed at your own risk.
Finally, the socialists at The Guardian have something positive to say about conservatives. It turns out we’re way more fastidious about personal hygiene than our liberal counterparts. To be sure, it’s a low bar; as anybody who ever walked by an Occupy encampment or a Phish concert can tell you. Still, if we must dwell on the things that divide us, it may as well be conservatives’ aversion to smelling like the floor mats of a NYC cab.
In truth The Guardian probably doesn’t mean it as a compliment:
People who have a greater tendency to turn their nose up at the whiff of urine, sweat and other body odours are more likely to have right-wing authoritarian attitudes, research suggests.
See, a real study by really smart Swedish progressives concluded that “having a greater disgust for body odours was linked, albeit to a small degree, with support for Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate.” Right-wing fascists’ disgust at other people’s stink causes their “social discrimination against others.”
This is what the scientists call “crap.” Look, you ain’t smelled anything until you’ve stood, nursing a majestic hangover, at the back of a packed Easter mass in Killarney, Ireland, with the local lads in from the fields. (This is before the Celtic Tiger and globalism introduced deodorant to the Auld Sod.) If the miasma of sweaty tweed and sheep dung doesn’t have you retching in the graveyard before Holy Communion, you’re a better man than I.
Traumatic, but I got over it. I don’t recoil from olfactory contact with foreigners (unless they seem French). Of course, I don’t go out of my way to sniff strangers -- you get punched for that sort of behavior.
But it turns out not even the Swedes who dreamed up this steaming pile of research believe it: “The findings, Olofsson noted, mean that it is not possible to accurately assess a person’s authoritarianism, or their political preference, based on their responses to body odour.”
Exactly! You don't have to be Mussolini to understand that hippies smell.
And now, more from the Black Lagoon of Leftism.
Quick Take -- Times New Roman: Typography Tool of the Patriarchy “ … because printing, lead type design and metalsmithing were traditionally male-dominated professions throughout history, there just isn’t enough non-male experience to feed into the visual language, and the typographic language, that we still use today.” -- “Can a Font Be Feminist?” Format Magazine
Why Would Anyone Ever Want to be a Feminist Writer? I found it! I’ve been hoping to be the first to identify one of those hoax academic papers ala “The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct,” or the Sokal Affair -- you know, the meaningless, jargon-larded tome that exposes how bankrupt modern academia is? This one, however, is posted on the feminist website The Establishment. “Why Would Anyone Ever Want to Be a Wife?” by Katie Schmid doesn’t seem to have been published in any journals. But it’s long enough to have been. And it has enough footnotes. And it’s absurd enough.
It’s hard to say what this really is about. In fact, one reason I suspected it to be a gag is that it doesn’t seem to be meant for anyone to read. The academic gobbledygook and thick, unlovely prose could have been generated by a computer program in the basement of a Wellesley College LGBT Center. So the best I can offer is a sampling of the silliness:
“Research has shown that masculinity as it is socialized in the United States is a life-threatening condition, produced via aggressive policing in homosocial environments, characterized by violence and limited emotional expression, one popular solution for which is the salutary prescription of taking a wife.”
“And still, men by and large view these more egalitarian practices in their relationships with woman as existing solely in their relationships, unable to incorporate them into conceptualizing their performances of masculinity outside their relationships.”
“To be fair, it is hard for a man to see his masculinity, much less theorize it, existing as it does in the form of covert, constricting nude Ken doll underpants.” [C’mon, tell me this isn’t a joke!]
“Every loving relationship between women is fed by an economy of care, the tools of which have been formed within heterosexist patriarchy, but which are profoundly antithetical to patriarchy.”
“The wife is a technology of supremacy inextricable from white heterosexist supremacy. To become a wife is to become complicit.”
You get the picture. If you do, please explain it to me.
Quick Take -- Our Gay Emojis Aren’t Interracial! “While emojis have come a long way when it comes to representation, there's one area that desperately needs improvement: multi-racial couple emojis.” -- Cosmopolitan
New Thug Life for a Dead Gangsta. An actress named Lala Kent believes that when rapper Tupac Shakur was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996, his soul didn’t go to Gangsta Paradise, it went to Utah. Specifically, he moved into Kent’s six-year-old body.
Kent explained this on anti-vaccine idiot Jenny McCarthy’s radio show (who knew?). McCarthy asked the blonde why she acts “hood” on social media.
“I don’t know where that comes from, I mean I am a firm believer that when Tupac died, he took over my body. I know you’re laughing, but I’m being for real,” Kent said. “I recently just got ‘thug life’ tattooed on me, and I feel so happy about it. It’s by my … the inside ankle on my left, and it’s up and down in my handwriting. It looks like a prison stamp.”
Charming. “I’m sure he is not thrilled with his new body casing,” Kent told McCarthy, “but I’m not thrilled about the temper.” Hopefully it works out better for them than it did for Elvis and Joan Rivers.
